Advokit is an open-source grassroots-network voter-file campaign-management tool developed by veterans of the Dean primary campaign and available either as a hosted (ASP) service or as a stand-alone install.

What is it with Republicans confusing .coms and .orgs? The GeorgeWBush.org parody site gets a lot of misdirected mail at their catchall address. Amidst the chaff were the occasional strategic or informative message sent to ad-hoc cc lists of Republican operatives, including a few that discuss out-of-compliance local campaign organizations and, most telling, a few with attached spreadsheets identifying lists of voters in a few Florida precincts.

The collection of essays now known as Extreme Democracy should appear in book form early next year, but it is coming out in serialized PDF (portadble document format) at the moment at the project's blog.

On the surface it appears that the latest Bin Laden video has had little effect on the presidential contest. But I've noticed a swelling chorus on rightwing sites pointing to a purported re-translation of a key passage on the tape that supposedly has the al-Qaeda head specifically threatening to attack any American state that votes for Bush.

Here's the translation of Bin Laden's conclusion, from the Washington Post:

"I tell you in all truth that your security is not in the hands of Kerry, nor Bush, nor al-Qa'ida. No, your security is in your own hands. And every state that doesn't play with our security, has automatically guaranteed its own security." [my emphasis]

And here it is from MEMRI, the Middle East Media Research Institute, a translation service with a distinctly rightwing tilt: "Any U.S. state that does not toy with our security automatically guarantees its own security." Note the insertion of the adjective "U.S."

BlackBoxVoting reports that there's evidence that an election in King County, Washington, was hacked 6 weeks ago. The site urges election officials to unplug the modems from the voting machines now:

There is no down side to removing the modems. Simply drive the vote cartridges from each polling place in to the central vote-counting location by car, instead of transmitting by modem. “Turning off” the modems may not be sufficient. Disconnect the central vote counting server from all modems, INCLUDING PHONE LINES, not just Internet.

Flickr is a photo sharing social medium application for the web that enables people to tag their photos with key words and then view or even subscribe to a feed of all photos that share a given tag.

For a fly-on-the-wall view of voting today around the country, check out the page for photos tagged with 'vote' at Flickr.

Despite cautions against leaking exit poll data before polls have closed, Slate has made an editorial decision to publish what they've got, and Jack Schafer is posting updates, including (at the moment) Kerry barely ahead in Florida and Ohio, Bush slightly ahead in Nevada and North Carolina, Kerry taking New Mexico and Bush taking Colorado.

Meanwhile, Zogby is projecting a solid electoral margin for Kerry and a slight popular edge for Bush.

Overheard on the #joho irc (chat) channel on irc.freenode.net:

akma: From #joiito -- ptorrone: Overheard in line at polling place this morning.... "I think all the ones with the white headphones are voting for Kerry"

The most popular political weblogs have been able to support their publishers through an intermediary called Blogads. As this election season heated up, most of the top sites saw extreme traffic spikes and have been able to set lucrative- but- competitive prices for ad views (not clickthrough) on their sites.

Dave Farber's list has circulated a message from an anonymized someone citing the "growing evidence of major problems with electronic voting machines." The msg points to an AP story, and to reports on BlackBoxVoter.ORG and BlackBoxVoter.COM.